Lego fly a kite
Banner day for Canadian space exploration.
Photo: k-ideas
The ultimate DIY experiment sending a Lego man to the edge of space using a home-made parachute and equipment found on Craigslist, which is like Gumtree apparently.
At a total cost of £254, two 17 year olds Matthew Ho and Asad Muhammad sent the little plastic guy 80,000 into the air using a helium weather balloon. The whole 97 minute journey was filmed using four cameras, the on board GPS allowing the apparatus to be recovered from a field some 122km from the launch site.
“People would walk into the house and see us building this fantastical thing with a parachute from scratch, and they would be like, ‘What are you doing?’” says Ho. “We’d be like, ‘We’re sending cameras to space.’ They’d be like, ‘Oh, okayyyyy …’”
Lego sent a note of congratulations to the science whippersnaps. “We are always amazed by the creative ways in which Lego fans use our products, and humbled by how many unsuspecting places we appear, like attached to a helium balloon….in space.”
